Turning the focus on ourselves: teacher education professors' reflectivity on their own teaching

Abstract

Schools and colleges of education everywhere proclaim the development of effective and reflective teachers as the centerpiece of their enterprise. The research questions that focused this qualitative study related to teacher education professors definitions of and metaphors for reflective teaching, the ways that they practiced it in their own teaching, the impact of their reflective teaching input on novice teachers' reflective teaching output, and their perceptions of factors that promote or inhibit students' ability to reflect. The semi‐structured interview approach was used to collect data from 26 participants. The analysis of the data resulted in four categories of meanings of reflective teaching and three categories of participants' assessments of students' reflective practice output. Further analysis showed some consistency between the participants' categorized meaning of reflective teaching and their assessment of students' reflective output. However, the opportunities that participants provided for reflective teaching and their perceptions of the factors that promote or inhibit students' ability to reflect occurred across meaning groups.